


A Thought Once Uttered

by chantefable, Vaysh



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: 1970s, Backstory, Department X, Gen, Historical References, Male-Female Friendship, Natasha Romanov Backstory, Podfic, Podfic & Podficced Works, Podfic Length: 20-30 Minutes, Pre-Canon, Red Room (Marvel), Silence, Slice of Life, Soviet Union, Spies & Secret Agents, Summer, Workplace Relationship, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-06-23 20:22:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15614286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chantefable/pseuds/chantefable, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vaysh/pseuds/Vaysh
Summary: 1976, the USSR, Stagnation era. Summer in the city.Natalya Alyanovna Romanova, long-serving black widow operative, is contemplating her state of being, workplace relationships, and the repercussions of her current assignment.





	A Thought Once Uttered

**Podfic Length:** 21:46 minutes

**Podfic Cover:** USSR postcard from the Exhibition Hall and park in Chișinău, cover by Vaysh

**Download Links:** [mp3](http://www.mediafire.com/file/vku8aeyn0ifbes2/A-Thought-Once-Uttered.mp3) (16.12MB) | [m4a](http://www.mediafire.com/file/ygciijwjm511etp/A-Thought-Once-Uttered.m4a/file) (20.18MB)

**Streaming:** [[podfic] A Thought Once Uttered (mp3)](http://www.hdcareerfair.de/Storage/podcasts/A-Thought-Once-Uttered.mp3)

  


* * *

  


**_Silentium_**

by Fyodor Tyutchev in Vladimir Nabokov's translation.

> Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal  
>  the way you dream, the things you feel.  
>  Deep in your spirit let them rise  
>  akin to stars in crystal skies  
>  that set before the night is blurred:  
>  delight in them and speak no word.
> 
> How can a heart expression find?  
>  How should another know your mind?  
>  Will he discern what quickens you?  
>  A thought, once uttered, is untrue.  
>  Dimmed is the fountainhead when stirred:  
>  drink at the source and speak no word.
> 
> Live in your inner self alone  
>  within your soul a world has grown,  
>  the magic of veiled thoughts that might  
>  be blinded by the outer light,  
>  drowned in the noise of day, unheard…  
>  take in their song and speak no word.

 

***

  


Natasha walks at a steady pace, stabbing her heels into the asphalt. City summer fills the air with fumes, and the streets soak up the heat. Lingering high temperatures have left the side-walks slightly sticky and almost soft. The soles of her shoes and the sharp tips of the heels are sinking into the asphalt. The sensation keeps briefly echoing in the muscles holding up the column of Natasha's spine. The folds of her circular skirt keep flapping around her tight calves, covering the knobbly knees. The dry air caresses the thick scar tissue on her thighs. 

It would be so fine to go to a sanatorium right now. Natasha wistfully thinks of her last trip to Yalta: twenty-four days, three widows in a room with a single wash-stand, four medically recommended meals a day, and a full set of daily rehabilitation procedures. Formally, each of them had been sent there from her own trade union. But for all that they were pretending to be strangers and living their own legends, of course they knew each other. It had been nice and familial: nice narrow cots, showers down the corridor, massages, hypnotherapy, and 'Eskimo' ice cream on a stick for twenty-two kopecks. The three of them did not talk, each keeping her own silence that spoke volumes. The weeks by the sun-lit sea brought a sense of proximity and affinity, all the more precious for how quickly it would be lost.

They did not talk about work then. 

Sveta, with high cheek-bones and milky-blue eyes, did not talk about the tremor of her hands and the way the left side of her face never moved quite right. In return, the rest of them did not mention the way Sveta's fingers sought the metal bed-frame at night and hammered out strings of radio messages in defunct code. 

Zukhra did not talk about the single strand of gray in her thick night-black hair and the swollen, arthritic joints of her feet. Natasha watched the way Zukhra strategically kept those rough, twisted feet in a rectangle of sunlight streaming through the window while she read in bed during the 'quiet hour' after lunch. She was grateful for Zukhra's silence. She did not mention their joint mission in Egypt in 1970, either. Natasha missing the live drop window, Zukhra's shattered tibia and Rimma, who had been Zukhra's partner for more than a decade, dying at the dirty dockyard so that they could complete the mission... Zukhra never once talked about it all being Natasha's fault. 

And Natasha – 

– Natasha did not talk about anything.

If that wasn't happiness, what was?

But now, it is another time; another name, another assignment. Now, Natasha is an employee in a scientific research institute of thermal technology, and she has to focus on calculations and calorifics. She spends her days at the bureau, absorbed in the subject of thermal fluids and heat processes, checking the figures for a narrow range of procedures. She cannot help feeling that this is an honorary exile. Fifteen years ago, she might have been embedded with a ballet company on an international tour, a cover that demanded as much physicality and endurance as the main deployment. She might have been attached to a trade representation, infiltrating the right circles in countries where they were fighting proxy wars, wearing three masks at once and using her astuteness to read people and manipulate circumstances. She is used to grueling physical labor, two hours of sleep per day, performance and analysis in the field, and long, exhausting months in different climates. But now, she is reduced to domestic desk work: like an old spider lurking in the corner and slowly weaving her web, she has to sit back and figure out whether there might be dissenters and saboteurs in that particular classified department working for the military industry, or whether they were simply dealing with yet another libelous report by colleagues keen on stealing someone else's laurels. She cannot help perceiving the assignment as a slap in the face. It is something more suited to an elderly intelligence operative, not a _black widow_. Natasha cannot help feeling dismissed.

The feeling is as unpleasant as the synthetic blouse sticking to the sweaty skin of her back. To think that there are still things that make her skin crawl… and yet, there are: negligence and contempt, at least when they are directed at herself.

Her pulse pounds heavily, like construction tools on the nearby site where yet another new high-rise, as ugly and faceless as thousands of its ilk across all the republics of Natasha's homeland, is slowly reaching towards the blue summer skies. Blood is thrumming in her temples and her ears are ringing from anger – 

– or rather, it is the shrill trilling of a passing tram, and Natasha should watch where she is going. Promptly stepping back, she teeters on the edge of the side-walk and catches her reflection in the dust-speckled windows of the tram car: red locks, fashionably stiff with hairspray, framing a face that still does not look a day over twenty-five. Or does it?

A shameful wave of self-pity swells inside her and Natasha stands still, watching the traffic light turn green, yellow, red – over and over. She probably doesn't look older than twenty-five, but in truth, she doesn't look twenty-five, either. She doesn't look like anything.

But the facts of the matter are there, hard and uncompromising: she is more than twice as old as what she may or may not look like, and, well, the retirement age for women working under hard labor conditions is fifty, provided they have worked for at least twenty years without interruption. Natasha's period of service as a black widow has been far longer than that. So is this her honorary retirement? Nauseatingly quiet assignments ferreting for information and intrigue in the intellectual swamp of academia and administration? She should be grateful they haven't actually written her off.

Red, yellow, green. Natasha stumbles on, turns right and hurries into a park past a gaggle of youngsters discussing entry exams. 

She loiters, taking in the trimmed grass and lush linden trees. Her heels are furiously digging into the gravel, and she circles around the walk-ways a few times before regaining her composure. She reaches out with her senses, dispelling the daze. As always, a part of her has been alert the whole time, and could have described the exact sequence of meandering turns she had taken, her own speed and energy expenditure, the faces and probable background profiles of the few passers-by she has encountered along the way. 

It has been three hours and twenty-five minutes. 

Natasha's shoulders and hamstrings are almost unbearably tense and she moves inappropriately, strangely, not fitting her persona at all. She realizes that her movements scream 'danger' and she tries to reel herself in, exasperated that she has allowed this to happen. If anything, a slip like this feels like another win for Belova, and Natasha is unwilling to let that happen. The sun is closer to the horizon now and Natasha's anger is no longer as raw, her ridiculous fit of self-pity fading away. 

Belova may have had the upper hand in back-room politics and been appointed deputy head of the Red Room. She may have written unsavory evaluations that have put a stop to Natasha training other widows and aging out of the program with any dignity. She may have shoved Natasha where she is now. But if she thinks that she is going to reduce Natasha to misery and self-flagellation… then Belova assumes too much. 

Natasha wades through dense summer air, thick and saturated like water. She is going to bide her time amidst the tepid mysteries of thermal engineering, lull Belova into a sense of complacency, and pick the right time for action. A mockery of retirement or not, Natasha knows that she has years ahead of her, decades. 

So does Belova, of course, but that's the lay of the land.

Momentarily soothed by her thoughts, Natasha spots two plainclothes militiamen approaching her and hastens to loosen the tightness in her lower jaw, in the muscles holding up her clavicles, her hips. She has attracted attention, after all; never mind that regular people – anyone outside Department X – are unable to tell what she is at a glance. Far too many distressing things bleed out whenever she unravels the way she just has. But by the time the two men catch up with her at the exit from the park, Natasha's persona is pristine yet again, proper and matching her assignment. The older of the two looks her over, gaze sharp like a fishing hook. Natasha can practically hear the way he aligns information, tries to pinpoint what set off warning bells in his head and match it to her current face and stance, regular and trustworthy.

“Apologies,” he begins in a low voice, quick and unapologetic. “Militia. Show your documents, please.” 

Natasha reaches for her passport readily and controls the micro-movements of her face, giving them the expression of a woman who has nothing to hide, who is mildly baffled and confident she will quickly be on her way. She looks from one man to the other, silently mapping their entire career in the Ministry of Interior. She can immediately tell the younger one would be more dangerous. Everything about him signals a brisk watchfulness, and he stares at Natasha through his pale eyelashes in a way that reminds her of the more enthusiastic colleagues from the Fifth Division of the KGB.

They are stalling, left with nothing to go on after Natasha lists her current name, her suitably respectable position at the scientific research institute and the address of the communal apartment she is living at. The younger militiaman's eyes dart sideways a heartbeat before Natasha registers a familiar presence in their vicinity, and she steadily does not turn around until firm footfalls can be clearly heard behind her back. Natasha is not going to slip anymore: she turns when an ordinary young woman would have turned, in the moment when the two militiamen in front of her stand at attention and salute to someone behind her left shoulder.

Of course it's him. (She can feel him with her gut at three hundred paces. He can hardly creep up on her like a ghost.)

In the space of a second, Natasha feels pleasantly warm instead of nauseatingly hot. 

He is in full uniform, shoulder marks glinting under the harsh sun, and he greets her with a firm nod before offering his arm.

“Natalya Andreevna, have you been waiting for me long? I beg your pardon. Duty.” 

She looks at him and feels grateful. Small kindnesses, what else could anybody wish for? 

“Not at all, Yakiv Petrovich. I came early.”

He turns to the militiamen, drawing her closer and giving them his affable off-duty stare, the one that is cold and wintry like slow death in the tundra.

“Is there some sort of problem, comrades?” 

“Negative, comrade colonel.” The older militiaman is quick to give back Natasha her passport. He is clearly not keen on getting between the stern military man and his date. Sound thinking.

The stern military man, Colonel Yakiv Petrovich Baranenko, dismisses them and walks his Natalya Andreevna away. Natasha feels the way the younger militiaman's eyes linger over her one last time, but it doesn't matter. He doesn't matter. He couldn't tell.

Yakiv could always tell everything that mattered about her. Back when he had been Yevgeniy, and Boris, and for a short painful while, in the very beginning, James. They had first met such a long time ago, in the wake of the Great Patriotic War, put away for recycling like battered and broken tools, and they had always known how to be silent together. There was no need for words when they got blood transfusions together, trained together, and watched over a flock of wet-behind-the-ears operatives together. No need for words when their pupils left, aged, and died in faraway places, and Natasha and _he_ stayed the same.

Not quite the same, Natasha corrects herself, feeling the cool of his left arm through the uniform and darting a glance. There is less gray in his hair now and fewer lines on his face compared to ten years ago, before tissue transplants… before they put what had been left of Rimma inside him. He certainly does not look over sixty, but he is nothing like Natasha. Colonel Baranenko is a very spry, very decorated, very respectable forty year old. A veteran of the Department X.

But he is also the Winter Soldier, and when Colonel Baranenko will no longer be useful, there is going to appear someone else. They put satellites into orbit and people in space. They stretch the widows' lifespan and endurance through chemical procedures, cryofreeze and caloric restriction. They can certainly find a source of youth and strength for the Winter Soldier. There is still plenty of time.

The day melts away as the two of them stroll through the hazy streets in companionable silence. They do not discuss Natasha's deep cover among petty engineers, or Yakiv's inexplicable memory gaps, or any of their infrequent meetings over the past years. He does not talk about how it went in Innsbruck in February, whether he is going to curate again. And she does not ask out of solidarity, remembering his accepting silence after Natasha's own notorious failures curating young widows attached to the Bolshoi Theatre. 

The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

They walk and walk, deep into the sleepy residential areas on the outskirts of the city, where tall concrete monsters of uniform sameness have long replaced traditional wooden villages. The velvety black of the night is punctured by the bright dots of street-lamps: efficient and reliable. Natasha's skin is clammy underneath her clothes, and she hasn't eaten in fourteen hours. But she would not change this moment for the world. 'Night, a street, a street-light, a pharmacy.' The two of them turn around and walk back to the city center with the same ruthless efficiency, with evenly spaced steps and breaths, like satellites circling the orbit.

That summer night in 1976, under the senseless electric light, they never talk about their fears and misgivings. Yakiv does not share what he has heard about Belova from his fledgling operatives during his mission in Austria. He does not say that he has recognized the face of the younger militiaman from a recent file, and that this Karpov fellow has been approved to join the program. He does not say that lately, his performance has been deteriorating just like his memory, and rehabilitation programs in classified sanatoria no longer seem to help. And Natasha does not talk about her nebulous plans, the seedlings of information she has been harvesting at the research institute, and the 'photo-sound letter' she had made in Yalta ten years ago: a picture of herself by the sea, just the way she is now, on a soft vinyl plate with impersonal but warm greetings in her own voice. She never sent it to Yakiv, of course. It would have been unnecessarily intimate and suspicious. But it is fine to have friends, even if they never talk of it or call it such.

In a quarter of a century, Natasha thinks that perhaps they should have.

***

**Author's Note:**

>  **Author's Notes:** Yalta, a resort city on the south coast of the Crimean peninsula, is located on the site of an Ancient Greek colony by the Black Sea; Greater Yalta spans tourist destinations on the coast from Foros to Gurzuf. In the 19th century, it was fashionable among the gentry of the Russian Empire, associated with writers like Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, as well as Tsar Alexander II (his Massandra Palace was later turned into a summer residence for Joseph Stalin) and Tsar Nicholas II (his Livadia Palace was used to hold the famous Yalta conference in 1945). Yalta was the main tourist destination in the Soviet Union since the 1920s, following Vladimir Lenin's decree "On the Use of Crimea for the Medical Treatment of the Working People". Numerous workers' sanatoria and residences for the party elite were built at the seaside resort.
> 
> Fifth Division of the KGB, founded in 1967, had to counter "ideological diversions" and protect the constitutional state. Various divisions curated international student, professional, and scientific mobility programs, religious organizations, foreign visits, sought creators and distributors of anti-soviet propaganda, performed counter-intelligence operations related to various dissenters, separatists and nationalists within the USSR, analyzed related intelligence, etc.
> 
> Alexander Blok (1880-1921) was a Russian symbolist poet who imitated Fyodor Tyutchev in developing a complex system of symbols for his body of work. A translation of the referenced poem (1912) by Alex Cigale:
>
>> Night, street and streetlight, drug store,  
> The purposeless, half-dim, drab light.  
> For all the use live on a quarter century –  
> Nothing will change. There's no way out.  
> You'll die – and start all over, live twice,  
> Everything repeats itself, just as it was:  
> Night, the canal's rippled icy surface,  
> The drug store, the street, and streetlight.  
> 
> 
> **Podficcer's Notes:** The German translation of 'Silentium' by Fyodor Tyutchev was made by Eric Boerner.


End file.
